Their Finest Hour and a Half (18 page)

A foreign-looking woman in a headscarf answered the door of Sammy's flat. She stared at the bunch of anemones he was holding, and then glanced sharply at his gardenia buttonhole.

‘Miss Smith don't want to see nobody,' she said.

‘I've been invited for luncheon.'

‘No.'

‘Sammy has invited me for New Year's Day luncheon.'

The woman moved her jaw very slightly, as if chewing on his statement.

‘He ask you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Wait.' She closed the door, leaving him alone in the communal hallway. It smelled of beeswax. There was no aroma of roasting meat issuing from the flat, no rattle of pans. Disconcerted, he lit a cigarette. He had smoked half of it by the time the door opened again.

‘Mr Hillier, you are?' said the woman.

‘Hilliard. Yes.'

‘Miss Smith say to tell you that Mr Smith dead in bomb.'

‘What? Nonsense . . .' Stupid woman. ‘I spoke to him yesterday afternoon.'

She looked at him silently. The whites of her eyes were very red.

‘What bomb?' he asked. ‘Where was there a bomb?'

‘His office.'

‘He wasn't in the office, I spoke to him here. It was New Year's Eve, why would he go to his office?'

Behind the woman, somewhere off the dark corridor that ran the length of the flat, a door smacked against the wall. There was a bursting rush along the parquet, and Sammy's brindled dog hurtled past the coat rack and came to a scrabbling halt between the door frame and the foreign woman's legs. It looked up at Ambrose, panting, and then looked past him, into the empty hallway. The thumping tail slowed a little.

‘He went into his office especially, Mr Hilliard. To collect something for you.' It was Sophie's voice, issuing from the doorway of an unlit room. Ambrose could see nothing of her but a shoulder, the crook of an elbow.

‘For me? What do you mean, “for me”?'

‘He wanted to fetch a film treatment for you to read. He expected that you'd turn up for lunch today. Even though you were so rude to him.'

The cigarette was burning his fingers. He dropped it hastily. ‘Are you sure that he's . . . ? I mean, how do you know that he's . . . ?'

‘They sent a policeman to tell me.'

The dog yawned, a noise like the squeal of an unoiled hinge. It seemed to Ambrose that time had passed and yet the scene remained static – the visitor at the door, the foreign woman with the accusatory stare, the voice from the shadows. It was as if one of the characters had dried on their next line; he searched through his own script. ‘Dreadful,' he said. ‘That's dreadful news. Of course, if there's anything I can do . . .'

There was another gap without dialogue. Cerberus sighed gustily and ambled back into the flat, toenails clicking.

‘Yes,' said Sophie. ‘They've asked for someone to go and identify him. Will you do that for me, please?'

*

He had done it before. In
Looking-Glass
(1928) he had been shown the body of his young wife, killed when her circus act was sabotaged by a jealous knife-thrower. The script had said, ‘
Langley Austen, his face a mask of anguish, embraces Thecla's lifeless form and swears to the gods that he will be avenged
' but Ambrose had argued, successfully, for a less exaggerated approach – the bereaved man's head drooping brokenly, his shoulders hunched with pain, one hand reaching out hopelessly towards the lifeless form and then withdrawing, like a wounded animal, and then a slow, almost imperceptible forging of the inner will, a whitening of the knuckles, the gradual lifting of the face to show eyes that glowed with determination and burned with molten hatred. In the event, the first thirty seconds of subtle emotional play had been hacked off in the cutting room, leaving a brief glimpse of his character looking utterly demented, followed by the caption, ‘I Will Have my Revenge on that Beast from Hell!', a fine example of the crass technique of those who claimed to have artistic control of the kinematic industry. He'd also had occasion to enter a mortuary in the role of Professor Gough (
Inspector Charnforth and the China Clay Mystery
), although the camera in that case had remained tastefully on the threshold, panning from the closing door to the sign on the exterior wall.

There was no sign on the wall of the temporary mortuary in the warehouse on Floral Street, and no door either. A piece of sacking hung from the frame, and as Ambrose paid the taxi-cab driver, the hessian was pushed aside by two ambulance-women carrying an empty stretcher between them. They paused to light cigarettes, and the taller of the two girls flicked the spent match in his direction. She had a round face, as plain and unadorned as a turnip.

‘You here for an identification?' she asked.

‘Yes.'

She shook her head. ‘Not this entrance. You reely don't want this entrance.'

Her companion emitted a little squeak of agreement.

‘Where, then?' asked Ambrose.

‘Through the alley and round to the right.' She stood casually, booted feet at ease; her overalls were bunched around her torso, unsexing her. She reminded Ambrose of a stage hand, brawny and unbiddable. He walked past her, not letting his eyes stray towards the sodden canvas of the stretcher.

It seemed sunnier at the front of the building. The other entrance had a red cross painted on the wall beside it, and a pretty little nurse so crisp and clean in her uniform, so delicate in her enquiries, that he felt like congratulating the casting director.

‘In here,' she said, and, ‘Please wait', and ‘Do you need a chair?' And then she hurried away and returned after a short time, and led him along a corridor and into a starkly-lit room where sheeted bodies lay on tables, and bowed figures stood in tableaux beside them.

‘I need to warn you,' she said, ‘that Mr Smith may not look quite as you remember . . .'

The sheet that covered Sammy was not a bed-sheet, but a length of unbleached cotton, like the material of a flour sack. Pure white was supposed to be difficult to light, of course – cameramen were always complaining about the brightness of white shirts, and requiring that white walls were ‘dirtied down'. If he had earned a guinea for every time that he'd been forced to wait in full make-up under baking lights while some junior member of the art department idly daubed a wall with—

‘Really – if you don't feel that you can do this, Mr Hiller . . .'

‘Hill
iard
. Of course I can do it. Take the sheet away.'

Carefully, she folded back the top section. Something quite fundamental had happened to Sammy's face. The convexity had been lost, the nose split from bridge to nostrils, a dark pulp filling the fissure, and though an effort had been made to wash him, the remaining features were outlined in black, as if with a grease pen. Shake a London building and there was filth, centuries of it. The neck was webbed in grime; even the fingertips, just visible under the edge of sheet, looked like those of a navvy, dirt rammed beneath the nails.

The nurse touched Ambrose lightly on the sleeve. ‘Mr Hillyer?'

‘Hill
iard
.' Dirt rammed beneath the nails . . .

It was the cryptic sign that hung in plain sight, the clue too obvious to be deemed a clue, except in the oblique vision of an academic seen by some as eccentric but by others as a focused beam of pure thought. Professor Gough smiled at the nurse.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, looking confused, ‘but can you confirm that this is Mr Smith?'

‘I'm afraid I cannot.'

‘Oh. You mean—'

‘I mean, my dear,' he spoke gently, almost absent-mindedly, ‘that this is not Mr Smith. Someone has obviously made a mistake – a very, very simple mistake, but one that might possibly fool the less vigilant. But perhaps I should explain . . .'

He held the look – wry, a little melancholy – and waited for the cut. They'd possibly need another take for sound; one of the background extras had sniffed loudly during the last speech.

‘Mr Hilliard . . . ?'

The nurse was looking at her watch. The world dropped back around him: the cold light, the metallic scent of blood. The extra was weeping, not sniffing.

‘I apologize. I was somewhere else entirely.'

‘You were saying that this isn't Mr Smith.'

‘That's correct. Sammy Smith is missing three fingers from his left hand, he lost them in an accident in a timber yard when he was a young man. This fellow's left hand is intact . . . poor soul.' He looked soberly at the figure on the table. ‘I can perhaps see how the mistake was made; the face isn't dissimilar.' It occurred to him that Sammy might be wandering around in a daze, he might be in a hospital bed, or at a rest centre, queueing for the use of a telephone, fretting about whether or not Cerberus was being served his correct daily ration of finest sweetbreads simmered in sherry consommé. ‘Should I call at a police station, do you think, or—'

There was a tiny noise, a batsqueak of distress, and when he looked at the nurse she was crying.

‘I'm so sorry,' she said. ‘We try so hard to make people look the way that their relatives remember. We didn't . . .' She plucked at the edge of the sheet, drawing it down so that it covered the exposed fingers. ‘We couldn't have known, you see.'

He stared at her, uncomprehending, and she wiped her eyes, quickly, with both hands. ‘You have to understand, Mr Hilliard, that the rescue services don't always . . . find everything. Sometimes the injuries are just – sometimes we don't know what belongs to whom and – we do our best. We try to make a whole person, but that hand . . . that arm must be from someone . . . It's awful. It's an awful thing to have happened. I'm so sorry.'

He could think of nothing to say. He looked back at the table, at the smooth contour of the sheet that covered a bloody jumble.

‘So do you think that that's your friend?' asked the nurse, tentatively.

‘My agent,' he corrected. He looked again at the face. ‘Yes. That's him.'

INTERMISSION

January 1941

The guards from the gunnery knew Edith by now. Every day except Sunday she arrived at the gap in the barbed wire at half past seven in the morning, and was waved along the path that uncoiled through the dunes. For the first hundred yards there would be near-silence – the hiss of air through the long grass, the muffled footsteps that seemed to come from yards away, rather than from the end of her own legs. The air was icy but still, the sand so cold that she could feel it through the soles of her shoes. Then gradually, a low roar would become discernible, increasing in volume with every turn of the path until the final dune was reached, and then Edith would brace herself and turn the corner and stagger a little as a wind that had skimmed the Urals came screaming at her from the length of Badgeham Beach. Away from the dunes the sand was packed as hard as brick, a single, sugared surface that sloped almost imperceptibly towards the sea, the pale sweep broken only by what looked like a series of giant hairpins stuck in the sand. A quarter of a mile away, a hedge of wire marked both the edge of the minefield that guarded the battery position and the limit of Edith's morning walk; the journey back, with the wind behind her, made her feel like a gull.

There was so much time here. After years of waking at six thirty, she was incapable of sleeping for longer, and after she'd washed and dressed, and had breakfast, there was still an hour and a quarter before the shop opened. On most days she had the entire beach to herself. Sometimes she found herself singing, the wind snatching the words away as soon as they left her mouth. She had a thin but true voice, and the songs were ones she'd learned at school, sea shanties that had always reminded her of holidays with her auntie and uncle and cousins on the coast: ‘Blow the Wind Southerly' and ‘Johnny Todd', ‘Fire Down Below' and ‘Heart of Oak':

At school, of course, she'd tittered with the others over the ‘flat bottoms' line, but now the verse had a dreadfully chilling edge. The new and terrible foes were just beyond the horizon, and the east coast was spiked with guns and encrusted with khaki. There were no trippers allowed here any more, no buckets and spades for sale in the shops by the harbour, no green glass floats.

Her own visit, of course, could scarcely be classified as a holiday (cousin Verna, for all her lavender cardigans and chapel talk, ran her sewing-room like an East End sweat-shop), but nevertheless there was still an air of respite about it. Edith had arrived at Badgeham-next-the-Sea like a gypsy, London's dirt in her hair, its smell lingering in her clothes, a rabbity nervousness to her gestures, and Badgeham had scoured and sand-blasted her, and bleached her in its white light. Her Sunday afternoon headaches had gone and she felt altogether more like herself than she had in a very long time, although ‘herself', of course, was still only Edith Beadmore. She felt, obscurely, that two near misses in as many months should have effected some visible alteration, but there was no change in the pale beaky face that peered out from the mirror, no hint that its owner might have experienced anything more traumatic than a crowded journey on the north-bound District Line.